


Life's a Well-Thumbed Machine

by Argyle



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-09
Updated: 2011-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-22 10:51:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Argyle/pseuds/Argyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not for the first time, Erik thinks that Charles is the most dangerous man he's ever met.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life's a Well-Thumbed Machine

That first night in the mansion, Erik doesn't sleep. How can he? The place exudes the sort of calm he has never grown accustomed to. Knowing it all belongs to Charles doesn't change a thing

He excuses himself from the others' company early, wanting ample time to inspect his room. He checks the locks on the window, manipulates the old brass to move the pane up and down several times before he's satisfied it can be opened with no more effort than a thought. Some feet below, there are a few well-placed shrubs -- they look like they would just support his weight.

If it came to it. Should he need to leave without being noticed.

Maybe Charles read this in him. He put Erik in one of the more isolated rooms in the East Wing, one that hadn't been used in years, if not decades. But tactically, it's well-placed. If nondescript.

There's a leather arm chair, and a sizable bureau. Some old books scattered about in modest stacks.

And a double bed, already made up with linens. The frame is an antique. It probably dates from before the turn of the century, by the look of the metal. Erik runs a hand over the sombre iron knotwork at the foot, then the higher rail, sensing the heft of it, the long hours a craftsman had labored over its casting and finish.

Then he sees the gashes in the floorboards around each of the legs, deep but smoothed with age.

Erik stretches out a hand. In a moment, the bed rises up, only a few inches off the floor, but a foot from the wall. He runs his fingers over the paneling behind it, up and down until he finds what he's looking for: a small X marked in the wood, delicate enough to have been carved with a penknife.

Even without his power, there's a tack that pulls easily enough out from the join, loose with use, and then a piece of the molding comes off in his hand.

Behind it, there's a space. Not really an alcove. Just an area scarcely larger than Erik's fist.

It's empty.

Or almost: Erik runs a fingertip along the edge, and a smudge of graphite and what seems to be pipe tobacco rubs unto his skin. A place for secrets, then.

*

"It's your room, isn't it?" Erik asks a few hours later when he finds Charles outside by the balustrade.

The night is cool, but Charles' collar is unbuttoned at his throat, and his sleeves are rolled to his elbows. There is no moon. Though if there was, Erik supposes, quite irrationally, that Charles' flesh would glow with it. Glow as if wrought from it. Still, his gaze is patient and bright.

"Trouble sleeping?" Charles replies, only half-turning.

"You know," says Erik.

"Yes." And then: "Come here."

For a few minutes, they stand there together, neither speaking, both just looking out onto the great swath of the lawn. Erik doesn't know what it could mean to be master of such a place. His life has been distilled into a suitcase's worth of possessions for longer than he can remember -- certainly as long as he has been _himself_.

And yet Erik sees the weary tint beneath Charles' eyes. But why? Charles had been decked at birth with privilege, with advantage. Surely whatever trials his abilities posed for him were softened before impact.

Charles looks up. "It _was_ mine. And I probably know that room better than any other in this place."

 _This place._ As if he hasn't long resided here, or it wasn't shadowed with several hundred years' worth of Xaviers, and hung with their portraits and baubles.

"When I was seven, I came down with a fever. Not influenza, not tuberculosis. Nothing the doctors could diagnose," Charles continues. Now he does shift: he braces himself on the railing with forearm and shoulder, facing Erik fully. "They didn't think I'd live. Do you know? I could _hear_ them say it, even when my mother pulled them down the hall, for once wanting to be tactful and out of earshot."

"Yes," says Erik, needing to say something.

"Do _you_ know?" Charles asks again. "Obviously, I pulled through. It took two months, and I read every _Tarzan_ novel three times over, but I was well again. And I had this."

Charles taps the side of his temple, so gently.

Erik can _feel_ him, like the crest of a wave, acute and ever-fluid and so very large. It's as though there is suddenly far more of him than before.

Not for the first time, Erik thinks that Charles is the most dangerous man he's ever met.

And then Charles recedes. Erik knows: Charles wanted him to be comfortable, there. "It will do," he says, after a while.

*

That first night in the mansion, it begins slowly between them. They're both tired. Charles leads Erik into what really is Charles' room, or is at least the place Charles has chosen for himself. It's far grander than than the other: Erik's room. Not only larger.

There's a small fleet of leather wing chairs. The books are formidable in length if not in the height to which they're stacked -- mostly modern things, genetics textbooks and the long treatises of twentieth century philosophers. Erik scans over the titles, his hands busy with his buttons. Like water off a feather, none of them stick in his mind.

And of course there's the bed: a large, canopied thing done up in polished mahogany.

The coverlet and sheets are soft on Erik's bare skin. But that's not what he wants.

Erik pushes Charles roughly onto his back, runs his teeth down Charles' chest, nips at the shallow curve of Charles' hip to coax and redden. He takes Charles in his mouth and begins to work his own cock in his fist as he moves.

It is as though Charles is there in full, uncondensed. The big bed creaks.

And Erik is coiled, as ever.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from "John, I'm Only Dancing" by David Bowie. Please forgive the anachronism!


End file.
